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Marie Darrieussecq

Biography

Marie Darrieussecq was born on 3 January 1969. Her mother taught French literature at junior level and her father was a technician. She grew up in the small village of Bassussarry near Bayonne in the French Basque country. As a child she was an avid reader, drawing on her family’s library, which she claims included texts as diverse as the works of Tolstoy and the latest bestseller. At the end of her thesis, she referred back to her early years, in terms that suggest that the key themes of her texts were foreshadowed in her childhood imagination, ‘[D]ans mon enfance, il y avait des fantômes autour de moi, les miens, silencieux et présents’.

Darrieussecq has claimed that she knew from the age of six that she wanted to be a writer. She wrote avidly and specialized in the study of literature from high school onwards. In 1986 she graduated from secondary school with a Baccalaureate in Literature. In 1988 she achieved a measure of early success, winning the Prix des Jeunes Ecrivains, awarded by Le Monde. Around this time, she also became drawn to the work of Hervé Guibert, whose ‘fractured biographies’ of HIV-infected characters spoke to a generation whose own lives were complicated by the threat of AIDS (quoted in Le Nouvel Observateur, 1737, 2 February 1998). She was later to complete her Master’s degree on this author.

In 1988 Darrieussecq began her higher education in Bordeaux, studying among other cultural and critical theorists the theories of Roland Barthes. The period 1990-1994 was spent reading French literature at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, which she described as one of dense writing and intense reading. She received her Agrégation de letters in 1992.

For her doctoral thesis Darrieussecq extended her critical analysis of Giubert’s work with complementary studies of Perec, Leiris and Doubrovsky. The main focus of the thesis was the interplay of autobiography and irony in these authors’ works.

After leaving the Ecole Normale in 1994, Darrieussecq taught French literature at the University of Lille, specializing in Stendhal and Proust. In an interview with Becky Miller and Martha Holmes (online at http://www.uri.edu/artsci/ml/durand/darrieussecq/fr/ent_exclusif.html), she stated that Stendhal’s Chartreuse de Parme comes closest to being her ideal novel, as she prefers ‘les livres auxquels il manque une pièce, qui font entendre un bruit... qui restent ouverts, inachevables, en quelque sorte indéfiniment à écrire’.

In 1996 Darrieussecq underwent a course of psychoanalysis. At this point she was writing both academic criticism and fiction. Her main published academic paper ‘L'autofiction, un genre pas sérieux', which dealt with narratology, appeared in the September edition of the journal Poétique. She also wrote Truismes while completing her doctorate. However, Darrieussecq has warned against interpreting either text as confirmation that her own writing is predominantly autobiographical. In Martha Holmes’ biography, she explains the distinction between life and art: ‘l'imaginaire est mon domaine, même s'il est forcément nourri (comme chez tous les écrivains) de mon vécu, comme s'en nourrissent les rêves: de loin et métaphoriquement’ (online at http://www.uri.edu/artsci/ml/durand/darrieussecq/fr/biographie.html).

Truismes – a postmodern tale of shape-shifting that sees a woman slowly transformed into a pig, caused a literary sensation when it was published by POL in 1996. The novel, which Darrieussecq describes as speaking ‘du corps, vécu de l'intérieur’, introduced themes that have become central to the author’s work (see Jérôme Garcin’s article in Le Nouvel Observateur, 1684, 19-25 February 1998). These include a focus on the traumatic transformation of bodies and an exploration of the porosity of physical and psychological boundaries. It also crossed boundaries in terms of audience, becoming both the object of academic critical analysis and a popular cult read. This success reflects Darrieussecq’s stated aim to produce novels that occupy ‘un espace entre Mary Higgins Clark et Claude Simon’. In retrospect, Darrieussecq has described this period as a turbulent one. In her late twenties, her first novel achieved sales of 300,000, the title was translated into 34 languages, and the film rights were sold to Jean-Luc Godard. In her own words she felt ‘a la fois epuissée et sur un nuage’.

Truismes was not Darrieussecq’s first complete novel, however. She claims to have written six previous works, not ‘mature’ enough to publish, but which helped her to develop her distinctive style. The as yet unpublished Sorgina (Witch), sent to publishers when Darrieussecq was just twenty, had already drawn her work to the attention of noted Minuit-editor Jérôme Lindon, and elicited feedback that prompted her to keep writing. However, it was Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens rather than Lindon, who was the first to accept Truismes for publication, starting an editorial relationship with POL, which has published all Darrieussecq’s main texts to date.

In 1997 Darrieussecq successfully defended her thesis – Moments critiques dans l'autobiographie contemporaine: l'ironie tragique et l'autofiction chez Doubrovsky, Guibert, Leiris et Perec – before a panel of four leading French academics. Following the success of her first novel, however, she gave up lecturing, a profession that she found hard to combine with dedicated novel writing.

—: ‘Experience and Experiment in the Work of Marie Darrieussecq’ in Women's Writing in Twenty-First-Century France: Life as Literature ed. by Amaleena Damlé and Gill Rye (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013, pp. 183-95)

Jones, Katie: Representing Repulsion: The Aesthetics of Disgust in Contemporary Women’s Writing in French and German (Oxford: Peter Lang [Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing 2], 2013)

Jordan, Shirley: 'Saying the Unsayable: Identities in Crisis in the Early Novels of Marie Darrieussecq' in Women's Writing in Contemporary France: New Writers, New Literatures in the 1990s ed. by Gill Rye and Michael Worton (Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press, 2002, pp. 142-153)

—: 'Figuring out the Family: Family as Everyday Practice in Contemporary French Women's Writing' in Affaires de famille: The Family in Contemporary French Culture and Theory ed. by Marie-Claire Barnet and Edward Welch (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2007, pp.39-58)

Roche, Daria Michelle: From Object to Subject: Language and the Body in Novels by Marie Cardinal, Christiane Rochefort, Marie-Claire Blais, and Marie Darrieussecq, (Thesis, held by University of Indiana, 2000)

— :'Between "white" and "blanc": The Margin of the Fantastic in Marie Darrieussecq's White' in Redefining the Real: The Fantastic in Contemporary French and Francophone Women's Writing ed. by Margaret-Anne Hutton (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009, pp.13-30)